More information is trickling out about the new Amiga hardware. In an email to Amiga dealers, Bill McEwen, CEO of Amiga, Inc., writes: "As mentioned in the press release we are in the final stages with the design of new hardware and getting them into production. Something that will be different than what happened with the AmigaOne is that we will be purchasing these new machines in the more than 1,000 units per order. This will allow us to get better pricing and quality for all of you. The specs for the sub 500.00 machines will be out on Monday and the more expensive machine the following week. Production will begin soon and they will be ready this summer."

I was an Amiga user for 10 years or so and I really loved my Amiga and I enjoyed it to be part of the Amiga community. I remember that I bought all the German Amiga magazines to hear about new Amigas and Amiga products. After the fall of Commodore, I hoped that Escom and later Gateway and Amiga Inc. would develop a new Amiga. A year ago I bought the book "On the Edge - The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" and I can recommend it to everyone that used to own an Amiga or a C64. I really enjoyed to read it.

But is there still a place for the Amiga today? I don't think so. What made the Amiga exceptional back then was how it made use of the back then limited hardware resources. I still remember when I first saw an Amiga game (I had a C64 back then). It was just amazing. But this came also at a price. The Amiga OS (and especially many games) were making use of the Amiga custom chips and that was the reason why it was so hard to develop a new Amiga computer. I think Amiga OS even today still does not have memory protection. The reason for this is, as far as I know, that most existing Amiga software wouldn't run with memory protection. In addition, back then Commodore (or better the company that developed the Amiga that was later bought by Commodore) developed custom hardware for the Amiga that was just better then everything else (at least in the price range of the Amiga). Later this became a problem, too. Commodore just didn't have the resources to compete with other large chip companies like Intel and there production process for the Amiga chips was quite dated in the end. Today there would be absolutely no point in developing custom hardware because you just can't compete with ATI/Nvidia. So basically the Amiga today would have to use standard hardware to get the best performance. So basically the only thing that would distinguished the Amiga would be its OS. When the Amiga was launched, Microsoft was far less dominant then it is today. There were few games for the PC platform and the PC and also Windows was technically inferior. Today Microsoft totally dominates the PC market. Most games are developed for the PC platform or for consoles. Even Windows became a quite reliable OS, having true preemptive multitasking, memory protection and many other advanced features. And of course there is a lot of Open Source Software and OSS operating systems which offer most things people need. In my opinion, all this makes it extremely unlikely that an Amiga comeback could be successful. I think even most fanatic Amiga fans (and there were a lot back then) turned away from the Amiga after ten years where basically nothing happend. At least I did. And I have to say, in addition to all that, after the experiences I made with Commodore, I don't want to ever rely on one single vendor again.

I said in the beginning, that I loved the Amiga, I enjoyed the great software like Deluxe Paint and the great games like Turrican (thankfully there are Amiga emulators so I can still play them and I even still have my old Amiga). I wish Amiga Inc. luck with bringing back the Amiga to the place it really deserved. I just don't believe anymore that they will succeed, but I would be happy to see that I am wrong.